


occlusion effect

by fluorescentgrey



Category: My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Canon-Typical Prostitution, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24490021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: "What I'm getting at, Mike, is that we're still alive."
Relationships: Scott Favor/Mike Waters
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	occlusion effect

When he first came around he would hear these bright, sustained sounds. That was how he would know he was asleep, and that it had happened again, and that it was ending. They were like wind chimes or foghorns or something but different. Long, sparkling drones. The greeting of consciousness. The self of his body waving to the self of his mind across the long darkness. Then he woke up, and he was leaning on Scott, deep in the dark shadows of some or another underclass waiting room at some or another bargain bin shuttle station at some or another ass end of nowhere mining planet at the edge of some or another galaxy. Fifty credits in his pocket, all he had to his name, not counting Scott’s family fortune or any of the cash hidden in a shoebox under a loose floorboard back home in the abandoned resort at the edge of the woods on Oregon III, if it still existed.

“I found you a job,” Scott said, feeling his eyelashes flutter open, “if you want it.”

Mike watched him cast his gaze askance to the ticket desk, where a redheaded man with copious adult acne was allotting boarding passes to the huddled mass of hungry, shivering desperates. It never stopped raining in this place, Mike recalled. Why had they even come here? It had probably been Scott’s idea. Scott had probably heard something about rich and lonely miners, hacked his trust fund, and gotten them on the first shuttle out of Portland, only, as always, to find the same kind of place, brand new and already bare, stripped to the core.

“He keeps looking at you,” Scott explained.

“Because I’m asleep on you,” Mike said. “It’s remarkably intimate for these environs.”

“Not like that,” Scott decided. “He has a lecherous intent.”

“God. I just woke up.”

“Do you want to get out of here or what?”

Mike did. So he got up, bracing himself with a palm against Scott’s head. Reality wobbled a little. Indeed, as he approached the desk, which was sealed in bulletproof plexiglass, the sunken and exhausted eyes of the ticket taker shifted over the shoulder of the woman who was presently begging him for lenience and clemency, cradling her children’s heads against each of her legs. Mike, who hadn’t seen his own mother outside of dreams since the last time astropolitical unrest had simmered down enough that it was safe to get through the asteroid belts encircling New Idaho, felt for her. “Listen,” he asked the clerk, over her shoulder, “isn’t there anything I can do.”

The clerk stammered. He looked like he was having a mild seizure. The woman turned to him and looked him up and down. Compared to Scott, Mike was unaccustomed to being evaluated as the sexy one.

He was eventually invited back “to speak to the manager.” It was quick and easy, almost remarkably so, just a blowjob lasting about two minutes, so that Mike wondered if the clerk had ever had one before. Maybe not. When it was over, they were sitting against the wall of a storage closet in the semidarkness, and the clerk said, “Where are you from?” 

“We don’t have to talk about things,” said Mike. He’d told the guy he was named Glen. 

“Oh. But — ”

“Where are _you_ from?” 

The clerk looked relieved. Or, at least, something changed on his face in the purplish darkness. “Greater Boston,” he said. 

“I’ve never been there.” 

“It’s not all that great,” said the clerk. 

“How’d you get here?” Mike prodded. He knew that, for people who were never asked about themselves, this part was almost better than the sex. 

“I was recruited out of this video game platform,” said the clerk. “I never thought they’d actually send me here.” 

“They’re recruiting in VR now?” 

“Yeah. You’d be surprised. They’re recruiting basically everywhere in the core ring, but nobody wants to come out here.” 

Mike tried to smile with a kind of sympathetic twist. “I wonder why,” he said. The clerk ducked in toward him and kissed him on the mouth, but it didn’t take him very long to realize that Mike’s mouth tasted like come, and also that Mike hadn’t brushed his teeth in a while, because he had lost his toothbrush. 

“Well,” said the clerk, “thanks.” 

“No, thank _you_ ,” said Mike. 

The clerk showed him to the “underclass assemblage area” and asked him to wait. Eventually the woman from the ticket desk and her two kids joined him, tailed by Scott, who was carrying the big backpack containing everything they owned between them in the known universe. “Well done, Mikey,” Scott said, throwing an arm around his shoulders.

Mike shrugged. “All in a day’s work. Where are we going anyway?”

“Unincorporated Cascade System,” Scott said. He sounded beside himself with anticipation. “They haven’t even named this planet yet. They’re calling it UCS IV. It hasn’t even been fully terraformed.” 

Mike wanted to go home, but that was the problem. You never quite knew if it was there anymore. Last they had heard, maybe three months ago, Oregon III had been evacuated due to a series of major seismic events caused by mining too close to the planet’s highly unstable core. New Idaho was in these respects a safer bet, being as it had been fully terraformed for farming, rather than mining, but the spaceports were often controlled by militias. Not even a blowjob would get you out of that kind of pickle. Mike knew from experience. 

“Sounds great,” he told Scott. 

“I really think you’ll love it.” 

The woman was looking at them like they were crazy. The kids were looking up at them, and their eyes were like occluded moons. Mike wondered why she was going to somewhere as nowhere as UCS IV. Maybe she was looking for the kids' father. Maybe she was in a similar line of work. Maybe she was a kind of tourist, the way Scott was, who wanted to to die in the effort of living. 

In a few minutes’ time the boarding agent came to let them through a door into the shuttle hangar and herded them up a rickety latter into the belly of the ship. It was an old Amazon-Boeing model, with the paint peeling, and only an electrified net separating the steerage passenger seating from the wealthy riders’ baggage in the frigid and windowless hold. Scott and Mike picked seats against the wall and set about unpacking the aluminum blankets they kept folded up at the bottom of the backpack. They knew that the shuttle companies kept the hold only as warm as they legally had to in order to prevent steerage passengers’ freezing to death, but hypothermia was common enough anyway. 

“What if this place sucks,” Mike said. 

“Then we’ll leave.” 

“I have fifty credits left,” Mike told him. “You have to do the date to get us off the next one.” 

Scott kissed his forehead. “Of course I will, Mikey.” 

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this story is dedicated to [secretcircuit](https://secretcircuit.tumblr.com/) in exchange for her donation to the [FANG community bail fund](https://www.gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund). i'm doing an [ongoing fundraising drive](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/619725572783947777/yeats-infection-yeats-infection) for organizations supporting racial justice protestors across america right now. if you'd like to take part, and i hope you will, please give and message me with proof (on tumblr or at fgreyfx @ gmail) and i will write you something.


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